Starting Five

DeCourcy: The people picking apart his assist/turnover ratio—14 assists, 18 turnovers—haven’t bothered with a few details. First, Arizona is 6-0 and winning by an average of 21.8 points. Second, the way Arizona is built it always has at least two, and sometimes three, players on the floor aside from Lyons who can create offense so his personal numbers in those categories are less impactful. Third, his coach is not displeased. At all.

“He’s been good,” Arizona coach Sean Miller told Sporting News. “He wants to learn. He brings toughness and shooting ability. We’re a lot better with him than without him.”

Even though Lyons went 0-for-5 on 3-pointers against Southern Miss’ zone Tuesday night, he is 11-of-28 on the season (39.3 percent). Even though the Wildcats committed 27 turnovers in that game, Lyons had only three. Lyons is averaging 12.3 points. He still needs to become more comfortable defending the ball after spending most of his three Xavier seasons defending shooting guards.

“It’s just different,” Miller said.

Oh, and there’s one more thing people who criticize Lyons are forgetting: Two years ago, Arizona reached the Elite Eight with MoMo Jones at point guard. Lyons will be fine.

DeCourcy: I’ve been astonished by the media’s general reaction to this circumstance. Almost in harmony, they’ve been haranguing UConn athletics director Warde Manuel to make Ollie the permanent coach. Some have said Manuel is being “unfair” to Ollie. Seriously.

Manuel was put in a difficult—almost impossible—position when Jim Calhoun chose to announce his retirement a month before practice was scheduled to begin. Only a few programs ever encounter this circumstance, and most—generally those that rush to appoint a nearby candidate as successor—wind up the worse for it.

Think back to when UCLA chose to fire Jim Harrick in November 1996. With Lorenzo Romar and Mark Gottfried having previously departed for mid-major jobs, Steve Lavin was the top assistant and became interim coach. When the team played well, the athletics director responded at midseason by making Lavin the permanent coach. Within four years, despite three seasons of Sweet 16 or better, the same A.D. pondered a coaching change.

Indiana got to the NCAA championship game under Mike Davis, who was promoted to replace Bob Knight after he was dismissed in September 2000 for violating a zero-tolerance conduct policy. But Davis’ second season was as good as it got, and there was considerable unhappiness among IU fans regarding his performance.

I’ve been over the whole Dean Smith/Bill Guthridge situation plenty.

So how come I remember all this and my colleagues choose to forget? I’ve only interacted with Ollie a couple of times, but he seems like an impressive guy. I loved his approach as a player. His team has been solid, particularly given that it plays without the incentive of appearing in the postseason and sustained significant offseason personnel losses because of NCAA sanctions. Ollie’s recruiting has been quite good, particularly given his interim status.

Is he the best coach UConn can hope to land? That’s a little harder to say. He became head coach with only two seasons of experience as an assistant. Given that, it seems reasonable for Manuel to want to give this situation plenty of thought.

DeCourcy: The fellow running the tournament said he believed teams wouldn’t flock to his tournament if it didn’t pay. “We knew there was no way we would be able to convince teams that it’s just better in the Bahamas,” George Markantonis told the Associated Press. Really? I know this is an odd question, given that he is president and managing director of the Atlantis resort, but has he ever been to the Bahamas?

If the people at the Battle 4 Atlantis want to give schools money for coming, that’s great. But they’re essentially bidding against themselves. Teams can’t visit the same event every year. So the teams that can go to Maui will still go to Maui when they can, and if Atlantis wants them they’ll take the great trip and the big cash in other years.

Here’s what’s really interesting: If the money is such a draw, how come the 2013 field is such a disaster? We’re talking Kansas, Villanova, Wake Forest, Tennessee, Southern Cal, UTEP and Xavier. No offense to any particular school, but that’s an off year for the Old Spice Classic.

Related

DeCourcy: What’s interesting about the whole Kentucky one-and-done issue is that kids like Towns—and Brandon Knight, and Anthony Davis, and John Wall—absolutely blow away the stereotypes assigned to them by opponents of the one-and-done rule. We’re told these kids aren’t interested in education or “real students.”

We’re told this mostly by people who’ve never met the young men in question.

Towns is an impressive teenager. When he announced this week he would attend Kentucky, the people at St. Joseph’s High in Metuchen, N.J., made sure to note his excellence as a student. I found him surprisingly loquacious when I spoke with him after an exhibition game with the Dominican Republic national team this summer.

He’s also a terrific player, a 7-foot center with perimeter skills as a shooter and ballhandler.

Not a bad get for UK, although he won’t be there until the fall of 2014.

DeCourcy: What perhaps made Majerus the greatest teacher of all is that he did not discriminate regarding whom he would accept as a student. That’s kind of underrated. Lots of great universities achieve status by accepting only the most accomplished students. Coaches can be like that as well.

Majerus was willing to teach the game even to a sportswriter, so long as that person was passionate about learning.